Get ready for the big boom as Canada’s seniors shape society

Shannon Proudfoot, Postmedia News01.03.2011

Ron Farrell at his home in North Bay ON., December 22, 2010 with the camera he uses to capture both still and vidio images while scuba-diving. Ron is part of the first group of baby boomers to turn 65 next year. Ron turns 65 on January 12, 2011.

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The first baby boomers — those original teenagers who were never going to trust anyone over 30 — will hit traditional retirement age this year, and Ron Farrell will be leading the pack, turning 65 on Jan. 12.

“The only thing I’d thought about was applying for Old Age Security because I wouldn’t want to miss one of those cheques, but when I did, I kind of resented having to write it down, because I don’t feel old,” says the resident of North Bay, Ont.

Farrell retired as a senior executive seven years ago and since then life has been packed with volunteer work, travel and cottage visits with his grandsons, so he says 65 doesn’t feel like much of a milestone.

“I couldn’t wait to be 18 so I could go in the pool room. And I wanted to be 21 so I could drink. You’re always looking to the future; there’s something out there that’s going to get better when you get a little older,” Farrell says.

“When you’re 65 . . . the horizon is sort of flat and you can see things you want to do, the bucket list, but you don’t see goals being attained by age, you see goals being attained by activity.”

Baby boomers — generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1966 — now include almost one in three Canadians, and they’re propelling a rapid aging of the population. But as the biggest generation in history heads into its “senior years,” experts say our views of aging are profoundly out of step with reality and due for a major overhaul.

“Get wise to the fact that while you might be the biggest and most important demographic, the forces of ageism are still alive and well,” says Susan Eng, vice-president advocacy for CARP, formerly the Canadian Association of Retired Persons.

“We all make these half-hearted jokes about hitting 40, 50, 60. We even have to keep saying things like, ‘60 is the new 40.’ What’s wrong with just being 60?”

Signs of our society’s neurotic views of aging are as close as the next commercial break, experts say, with older people in marketing caricatured, ignored or expected to follow the lead of celebrities who haven’t aged a day in the past two decades.

Kay Van Norman, president of the Montana-based consultation firm Brilliant Aging, says the image indelibly burned into her memory is the infamous “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” commercial for an emergency alert company from the early 1990s. If older people aren’t being portrayed as frail and needy, they’re skewered as doddering fools on sitcoms and The Simpsons, she says, or compared to “super-humans” like Raquel Welch, whose ageless faces and bodies are impossible to match.

Long after sexism and racism became unacceptable, ageism remains “the last bastion of the ‘isms,’” Van Norman says.

“I was at a grocery store and picked up a card that had a bunny on the front wrinkling up its nose and saying, ‘I smell an old person,’” she says.

“If you replaced the word ‘old’ with a word describing any ethnic or religious group, people would go insane. You’d have people picketing the store. When I brought it to the clerk’s attention, she said, ‘We’ve sold a lot of those. I don’t see anything wrong with it.’”

Even Dove’s celebrated Campaign for Real Beauty, which included a photo of an old woman with the caption “Withered or wonderful?” only worked because of the widespread ageist attitudes it questioned, says Colin Milner, CEO of the Vancouver-based International Council on Active Aging.

“With a lot of the anti-aging products, we have literally medicalized aging and made it a bad thing, a disease, you need to fight it — even though the moment you are born, you’re aging,” he says.

Matt Thornhill worked in mainstream marketing before launching The Boomer Project, a Virginia-based market research firm, in 2003. The young guns who populate many ad agencies view anyone over 55 as “pretty much dead,” he says, and when they do address them, it’s usually with commercials hawking pharmaceutical solutions for the problems that apparently consume what remains of their lives.

“None of it is aspirational, none of it is positive,” Thornhill says. “It’s all, ‘You’ve got issues, we’ve got answers.’ It’s enough to depress you if you’re 65 and older.”

That’s starting to shift, he says, and celebrities such as Harrison Ford, Bruce Springsteen, Sigourney Weaver and 72-year-old Jonathan Goldsmith, “the most interesting man in the world” from the Dos Equis beer commercials, are helping make age alluring.

“Boomers have made 60 the new 60. You’re not old at 60 — it used to be you were,” he says. “Thanks to the longevity revolution, old age doesn’t kick in until you’re 75 or 80 years old, so that means we’re still in middle age at 60 or 65.”

David Foot, a University of Toronto economist and author of the bestseller Boom, Bust & Echo, says average life expectancy in Canada rises by two years every decade and it’s that astonishing growth in longevity and the sheer size of the boomer generation that will change society’s thinking about aging — not anything special about the boomers themselves.

At 65, a baby boomer’s grandfather could have looked forward to seven more years of life and his father to 12 more years on average, Foot says — but a male boomer at that age today can expect another 17 years.

“The 65-year-old can’t believe they’re turning 65. They think they’re more like 50,” he says. “So the rising life expectancy is stretching out the difference between physical reality and emotional reality.”

This gap can cause real conflict, he says, and woe to the pharmacist who makes a boomer feel “old” — even if they really do need the arthritis medication offered.

Andrew Wister, professor and chair of the gerontology program at Simon Fraser University, says much of the discussion about aging has focused on “apocalyptic demography” predicting that greying boomers will collapse the pension and health-care systems and cause an explosion of dementia.

“You’re assuming the boomers are going to be the same as the current cohort of people 65 and over, and that’s a major mistake,” he says.

Moses Znaimer, the Canadian media mogul who created youth-oriented icons such as MuchMusic and Citytv, says he saw the coming demographic shift in the late 1990s and switched his focus, following the enormous boomer cohort as they aged. Now executive director of CARP and CEO of ZoomerMedia Limited — “zoomers” being his name for boomers with zip — Znaimer says others in the industry thought it was a strange move at the time, but they’re starting to follow suit.

“You see advertising starting to acknowledge that there are people (older than) skinny 20-year-olds, and they’re handsome and beautiful and sensual and sexual, and all of that is part of the good news of this story, but you’re usually drowned in images of vast battalions of the frail and the indigent,” he says.

Boomers are an activist generation accustomed to wielding major social clout, and they’ll turn their backs — and wallets — on any company or marketer that insults them, Eng says, and that’s what she believes ultimately will change the societal view of aging from a disease to be battled, to a pinnacle to be celebrated.

Farrell in North Bay is certain his generation is about to redefine retirement and old age, just as it has changed every stage of life they’ve moved through — though he notes that at $500 a month, Old Age Security won’t provide them much security. He suggests the benefit would be better named “Single Malt Allowance.”

“When I was 25, I thought 65 was bloody old, but now my perspective has changed, of course,” he says. “We’ve shaped everything else, from the minivan, to baby food, so I’m sure we’ll shape that as well.”

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